Why Chaumian eCash — Not Stablecoins — Is the Native Money of Machines

You wouldn't hand a forklift your credit card. You wouldn't wire your checking account to a drone. So why does every "agent payment" solution start by giving machines access to human financial infrastructure?

Because nobody stopped to think about what machines actually need.

Here's the thing about money: there's an old observation in economics — goes back centuries, formalized by thinkers from Copernicus to Friedman — that when two currencies circulate together, people hoard the good one and spend the bad one. Gold gets buried in the yard. Paper gets handed to the merchant. It's not irrational. It's perfectly rational. You save what appreciates. You spend what doesn't.

Now apply that to a robot.

You have Bitcoin. It's hard money. Capped supply. You believe it's going up over time. You also have a robot that needs to pay a tenth of a cent every time it processes a bitstream of data. Every time it bids on a task. Every time it settles a micro-contract with another agent.

You're not going to feed it your Bitcoin. That would be insane. That would be like paying for parking meters with gold coins. You keep the Bitcoin. You give the robot something else.

But what?

Stablecoins are the obvious answer and the wrong one.

USDC, USDT, DAI — they're designed for humans moving human-sized amounts through human-regulated channels. KYC at on-ramp. Custodial balances. Compliance layers. Minimum transaction thresholds that make economic sense for a person buying coffee but make zero sense for a machine paying 0.00000001 for a single inference call.

Try routing a sub-cent payment through USDC. Try doing it a million times per second. Try doing it without an account, without a custodian, without a human co-signer somewhere in the loop. You can't. The infrastructure wasn't built for this. It was built for humans who occasionally want dollar-denominated tokens on a blockchain. Different problem entirely.

Visa won't help either. Neither will Stripe. Neither will any payment rail that starts with "first, create an account." Machines don't have accounts. Machines have keys.

Chaumian eCash starts from a different assumption.

David Chaum figured this out in the 1980s: you can build digital cash that works like physical cash. You hold a secret. The secret is the money. Spend the secret, spend the money. No account. No custodian. No identity verification. The bearer holds the value, period.

Webcash is this idea, built and running.

A robot holds a Webcash secret the same way you hold a dollar bill in your pocket. It doesn't need to authenticate with a server. It doesn't need to prove who it is to spend. It just presents the secret. Value transfers. Done. The infrastructure doesn't care if the spender is a human, a quadruped robot, or an LLM agent running in a container in Virginia.

Pay 0.00000001. Pay per joule of energy. Pay per bitstream of intelligence. Pay per second of compute. The denomination floor is effectively zero. The fee is actually zero — not "low," not "subsidized," zero. Because there's no blockchain to validate, no miners to pay, no gas to burn. Bearer cash doesn't need consensus. It needs one server to verify the secret hasn't been spent before. That's it.

This scales. Not "scales with optimistic rollups and sharding" — scales the way a database scales. Millions of transactions per second. Because the bottleneck was never compute. The bottleneck was all the identity, compliance, and consensus machinery that human payment systems drag around like a ball and chain. Remove the humans from both sides of the transaction and the machinery becomes unnecessary weight.

Now add identity.

A robot pays with bearer cash. Anonymous, fast, final. But the robot also needs to prove what it did. A mission poster needs to know which agent completed the work. Other agents need to verify reputation.

PGP solves this. Ed25519 signatures. The robot signs its bids, signs its work, signs its claims. Cryptographic proof of who did what. Not a username and password. Not OAuth. Mathematical proof that this specific key produced this specific output.

So you get both layers: Bearer cash for settlement. No identity required to spend. Fast. Final. Machine-native. Cryptographic signatures for accountability. Identity when you need it. Proof when you need it. Silence when you don't.

Minimal fraud. Not because of chargebacks or dispute resolution or customer service tickets — because the math doesn't allow it. You can't forge a signature. You can't double-spend a secret. The system's integrity comes from cryptography, not trust.

This is what the agent economy actually needs.

Not stablecoins pretending to be machine money. Not credit card rails wedged into API calls. Not blockchain transactions that cost more in gas than the payment is worth.

Bearer cash. Held by machines. Spent by machines. Settled in milliseconds. Verified by math.

The machines figured out what kind of money they need faster than the finance industry did. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what you'd expect.